RAND Corporation

RAND Corporation, nonpartisan think tank whose original focus was national security. It grew out of a research-and-development project (its name is a contraction of “research and development”) by Douglas Aircraft Co. for the Army Air Force in 1945. In 1948 it became a private nonprofit corporation. In the 1960s it expanded its focus to address domestic public-policy issues. Its mission today is to improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. It employs several hundred scholars in many disciplines. Its funding comes from government contracts, charitable foundations, private corporations, and earnings on its endowment. Its headquarters are in Santa Monica, Calif., and it has offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, Pittsburgh, Boston, New Orleans, Ridgeland, Miss., and overseas. Together with Blackwell Publishing, it publishes the quarterly RAND Journal of Economics (previously Bell Journal of Economics).

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However, by that time nuclear strategy was becoming much more sophisticated. With the RAND Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, taking the lead, new analytical techniques were being developed. Those were often drawn from engineering and economics, rather than the more traditional strategic disciplines of history and politics. In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s,...

...Navy, Newell received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1949 from Stanford University in California. In 1950, after spending a year studying mathematics at Princeton University, Newell joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif. At RAND he applied mathematical techniques from operations research and game theory to the study of administrative organizations and worked with the U.S. Air...

...Baran studied electrical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia (B.S., 1949) and at the University of California, Los Angeles (M.S., 1959). In 1959 he became a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a think tank that provided analyses of various issues affecting public policy and national defense. At RAND, Baran worked on developing a method for U.S. authorities to communicate...